Roaming Around

Mallwyd Hill looms over my winter brassicas

Not content with trundling down to Carmarthenshire last week to visit an off-grid bakery, this week I have ventured afield to four (yes, 4) places: Newtown, Birmingham, Derby and China.

Hold your horses if you are about to vent your spleen all over my comments box about how hypocritical of me it is to jet across to the Far East for what must have been a very short visit, all will be made clear.

Cwm Harry's veg beds

In Newtown there is a well-established veg box scheme run from a centre called Cwm Harry which both grows its own (providing opportunities for some with learning disabilities to get involved) and buys in veg from local people and through an organic wholesaler in Lampeter, which is then distributed to the doors of about 25 customers each week.  A few of us who help run the Machynlleth veg bag scheme got ourselves organised (with help from the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens) and trekked over there to pester the manager with lots of questions as to how it all works, logistically, financially and emotionally. Nearly everything is done differently from how we do it, but that's fine – Machynlleth's scheme is explicitly aimed at supporting local growers (whilst providing customers with very local and fresh produce) whereas Newtown's version is more about providing customers with better veg than what the supermarkets offer, at a competitive price. An instructive day out.

Cwm Harry's raised beds (they sell them flat pack)

A sedum roof gathering spot at Cwm Harry

The attractions of Birmingham are legendary. Shop till you drop at the Bullring. Gawk at the paintings and old things in the gallery-museum. Look fashionably well-read by strolling around the new Library, sniffing the various herbs in its outdoor gardens on large balconies several floors up with a Wordsworth anthology under your arm. Shop some more at the Bullring. Yet despite all these extremely compelling features, it was actually something else entirely which drew me there – the confluence of two pairs of university friends with associated pairs of children, none of whom I had caught up with for a number of years, and a great couple of days was had re-acquainting ourselves and getting muddy playing football.

Derby being just a stone's throw from Birmingham, at least if fired by some military-grade missile-launcher, I decided to hop on over and see how Brian and Martha* were settling in there. Brian had been the Warden of Pilsdon Community when I was first investigating it and had made the decision to take me on as a residential volunteer, so it's largely down to him that my life has taken the trajectory it has over the last couple of years. He is now a chaplain at the University of Derby and enjoying getting his teeth into a new challenge (as well as drawing a salary for the first time in about ten years - even Wardens at Pilsdon don't get compensated much in actual money.) Martha is offering her (recently accredited) counselling skills voluntarily at a women's refuge.

It was great to see them both and they even took me out to the theatre to see the first night of a production of Little Voice, guessing rightly that such cultural opportunities come few and far between when living in a boggy field in rural Wales.

Some of the stones I've dug out of the garden

And China? OK so I haven't physically jetted there myself this week but what happened was this: a Chinese friend of my parents, who lived not far from them in Lancaster, came to visit to make a short documentary about what I'm up to, and why.  After editing the footage he took of me droning on about small-scale ecologically-aware farming, he plans to upload it to the Chinese version of YouTube and convert the entire population who, he says, are entirely devoted to the consumerist dream – everyone is moving from countryside to city, virtually no one is moving the other way. He took his wife and son back to live in Beijing this week; the documentary has gone with him. If there are more people like him in China there's hope that the tidal wave of consumerism and all the environmental impacts that go with that might begin to abate.

* names have been changed